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Website owners know how hard it is to promote a site and get exposure among all the competition out there. We all want good backlinks and free adspace for our sites, but it’s not always easy to find. Web directories are going the way of the dinosaur and you need new ways to get juice to your online presence these days. Well, I think I found a novel marketing idea that can help you.

My recommendation for today is a site that is perfect for free advertising to give your web presence the boost it deserves. The site allows you to place your own website’s 125×125 banner on it’s PR3 page, which should give you a serious boost, especially to any new site looking to get an edge on your competitors. Plus, you are not some lost link buried so deep in a directory that no one can find you. You’re ad is actually seen!

It’s easy to use too! Just click to submit and then click on any available banner ads space location you want and fill out the simple form and you are on your way! It’s that easy! Go do it!

I see webmasters asking the question “how much is my site worth?” quite often, as if there was an easy answer to that particular query. Truth is, there are so many variables involved that it would make your head spin! While there are several site evaluation websites out there, they tend to be sadly lacking in any useful criteria in analyzing your site. I’m sure that, if you’ve used any of them, you’ll notice that they have WILDLY varying outcomes on your site’s value. One might put your worth at $3000, while another might say only $30. None of them seem to agree!

In my search for a more reliable gauge of value, I found this very thorough Internet Business Valuation website that does an extremely good job of bringing together all the MANY factors that go into appraising the value of an online business. Unlike all those other sites that basically just ask for your domain name and then spits out a figure based on the keywords in your url, this one actually encourages you to input as much information as possible in order to come up with a much more accurate figure.

This Internet Business Valuation tool takes into account the expenses needed to run your site, as well as how long it has been a consistant earner for you. It even processes additional factors, such as uniqueness, skill level and time needed to run your site, which would be very beneficial for your potential buyer to know as well. Put all this together and you definately have a better picture of what you can present to your buyers when you go to a sales market, like at Sitepoint. Try it and see for yourself how surprising the results can be!

It’s all about the backlinks, baby! Offline SEO is every bit as important as what you put on your website content pages and you want to have as many good quality, one way links back to your site as you can get. There are many benefits of bidding directory to consider, such as the valuable SEO link, of course, but also the traffic gained through bidding on a good spot.

There are a few things to consider here, like making sure you pick the right category for maximum benefit. Where you get listed may depend on your advertising budget, but you should always have money put aside for advertising on bidding directories. After all, when you use those free sites you sometimes get what you pay for, and that’s not a good thing if your online income depends on it.

Getting the word out about your new online enterprise should be done in as many meaninful ways as you can afford and learning the benefits of bidding directory submissions should be one of them. Read about how it works and then use it to your advantage, as it can be yet another useful tool to add in your arsenal of ways of dominating the SERP for your keywords. You ARE trying to get to the top, right?

First of all, Cafepress is a product merchant which allows you to make money selling your designs. The basic idea is to create a shop, add your designs to the shirts, coffee mugs, or stickers, and cafepress will sell the items for you. The only problem is, most people’s designs never get found because they are marketed poorly. For any product you want the internet’s public to see, you must market effectively.

The great thing about cafepress is the ability to share your designs without having to get your design past some snobby editor. You simply create an image and choose which products to put it on, and then your shop’s visitors can purchase the shirts. Since you’re already studying marketing for your own websites, you have an advantage over other cafepress users. Market your cafepress profile like you’d market a website, and make sure you have quality content in order to sell your products.

Key Notes on Cafepress:

• “For each member you recruit to CafePress, you will earn five percent (5%) of the base price of every sale they make for a period of one year from their join date, excluding self-buys. For example, if you refer a friend and they sell five white t-shirts, you will earn $3.49 (5% of $13.99 x 5 t-shirts).” -directly from their site.
  Cafepress has premade banners which you can use to get people to sign up:
• Go to this Page to find out what size an image should be to work best with a certain product. It’s important to know, because when you size an image wrong it ends up looking too small when it comes out on the shirt.
• Many cafepress users use squidoo pages to hep promote their cafepress shops. You can use your own website, blog, social networking profiles, myspace, or etcetera in order to promote your shop. You should advertise your cafepress shop just as you would advertise your website, minus worrying about pagerank.
• Quality and Quantity mix well: The more shirts you make, the more likely someone is to find your shirt in the marketplace. Though, shelling out crappy designs that you didn’t think out properly will hurt your shop’s reputation just like content on a regular website. Make sure your designs are quality, and you’ve reviewed them numerous times before releasing them to the public.
• Product Descriptions: Just like any other website, keywords and descriptions lead to search engine traffic. Always make sure to add descriptions to your cafepress products, because they will get you more traffic from search engines and the marketplace.
• You can affiliate with other cafepress members by linking to their products from your website. You get a portion of the money made from the sale when you do this.

You can get started selling shirts now by clicking on my referral link Here~ Yes I know, I’m a bit shameless about that sort of thing right? If you have anything against being referred by me, then just go to cafepress.com, but I’m not going to hyperlink that for you .

Good luck selling shirts~

Subscription is something you would usually associate with a prescribed drug you’ve been taking. Either you or your insurance company has to pay for that drug. In other words, someone happens to be paying for something, and you don’t want people to think that your RSS feed is for sale. So whenever a non-savvy internet N0b comes to your site and sees the word subscribe they’ll think you’re trying to get them to pay for something. Depending on what kind of blog you run, you might want to change the text subscribe to something else.

Although it only takes a single intelligent thought to come up with this theory, I didn’t do it on my own. I realized the extent of the word subscribe’s negative effects after reading a post on CopyBlogger. You can find the statistics, (a 254% rise in subscribers) after changing the subscribe text to something else on their post. What you’ll find is a somewhat drawn-out post that tells you what you need to do to increase your subscribers, and a screen shot to back the information up.

My question is, do you really want or need subscribers that don’t even know what subscribe means? Sure any kind of reader can bring a boost to your traffic and is a potential ad clicker. Though, if that person doesn’t know what subscribe means, will they know how to use their newly found RSS feed? So, if that person doesn’t know how to use an RSS feed, how will the feed help you to bring that person back to your blog? Copyblogger doesn’t seem to see a good enough reason to switch their subscribe button to something new either.

So in the end it’s up to you, the webmaster. Do you want to change your subscribe button to say something like, “Get our Feed Sent to You!” for the people who don’t know what subscribe means, and probably don’t know how to use an RSS feed anyways. Or would you leave your subscribe button alone for the more tech-savvy internet browsers. Who knows, maybe the people that know what subscribe means will get their feelings hurt when they think you are downplaying their intelligence.

Maybe changing the button to say “Subscribe for Free” would do just fine. Or, maybe I’m just delving way to deep into this subject.